If not now, then when?

There are a million discussions and views on where the telecoms industry is going, and how it's going to get there. By far the biggest contention is the current debate around cutting the cost of termination and whether that saving will be passed to the consumer.

Action really kicked off in the space last week, when the Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA) called the operators into a “private meeting” to discuss the cost of telecoms in the country. At this meeting, operators agreed to “renegotiate interconnect agreements”, which means little to the man in the street.

Essentially, there is the assumption that mobile operators will drop the rate of termination. Another is that this will lead to the direct drop in actual call costs. After chatting with several people in the industry, I am less inclined to believe that any dramatic cuts will be made for the consumer.

While there will definitely be some impact on the consumer budget, thanks to the big stink made across industry and government, it won't be the big bang that people are hoping for.

There are extremely divergent views in the industry about just how much of drop we can expect.

With large chunks of revenue being made by all the operators through interconnect, some watchers say lower rates will impact on the operators' investments in infrastructure and possibly even social investment.

Others have pointed to the now famous Namibian interconnect rate slash, which has reportedly seen no change to the consumer rate at all. The regulator in that country forced operators to drop the rate from 1.06 Namibian dollars to 60 Namibian cents per minute - the idea being to continue the rate cut until 2011.

The Namibian situation seems also to have become something of a disaster, with operators squabbling over the new prices and the communications ministry having to gag the operators from making any public statements around the issue.

Can we expect to see the same furore here? I doubt it's a spectacle the local operators want to see happen, particularly after the bad press they've experienced this year.

James Herbst, CEO of Huge Group, explained to me in an interview last week that operators wouldn't want to take an instant knock to revenue; rather, they would prefer to lose market share, which will slow the losses on the balance sheet.

I am less inclined to believe that any dramatic cuts will be made for the consumer.

Candice Jones, telecoms editor, ITWeb

There is no real way of knowing how the operators will handle the situation, and right now it's all speculation. They have gone into ostrich mode when it comes to questions on what the plan is - but they have all vehemently defended their position in the past.

They say there are “real costs incurred” in interconnect, which I am sure there are. The question is - just how much? ICASA is supposed to be conducting an impact study, trying to figure out just how much it costs the operators to terminate on each others' networks - while we are assured that some sort of study is being conducted, it's not clear what it will cover or when it will be released.

ICASA doesn't seem to have a clear direction on what it wants from the operators. While it doesn't need to stipulate the actual figures, it does need to have a purpose in the whole matter. All the regulator can tell me is that it wants to promote competition and bring down costs, which makes the interconnect clampdown look like a token gesture.

ICASA says it expects the first report-back on this new industry-led interconnect cutting process by next month.

While the regulator is pretending to have teeth, it is also hedging its bets, and no surprises here, since it doesn't exactly have the best reputation.

A councillor interviewed on Carte Blanche on Sunday night let slip that the regulator knows it's up against the big dogs, and there is some chance that when it comes to the crunch, the operators will do what they usually do - pull out the lawyers. And truly, ICASA always bends over when faced with the possibility of court.

The last few times ICASA tried to clamp down on the operators' practices, the legal guns got pulled and ICASA fell over and played dead. Just look at the way it swept the handset subsidy regulations under the rug.

All of this will eventually lead us to the general mantra of the industry, which goes something like this: “It will bring down costs for the consumer, just not right now.”

It reminds me of a song written by the great Tracy Chapman, which says: “If not now, then when?”